


Ignite

by banshee_in_the_dark



Series: Ignite Series [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Bonding, Comfort Sex, Emotional Sex, F/M, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Smut, Romance, emotional tether
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 17:40:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1696811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/banshee_in_the_dark/pseuds/banshee_in_the_dark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some sparks burn the brightest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ignite

**Author's Note:**

> So this came out a lot weirder than I originally thought. Let me know what you think?

“Jesus fucking Christ, Lydia. _Gently_.”

“Oh, don’t be such a baby.”

The tweezers twist deep inside the flesh of his upper right arm making blood gush out in rivulets from the perfectly round hole. A couple of inches south and that bullet would’ve blown his elbow to a million pieces leaving him incapacitated for life probably. He doesn’t think his insurance would cover a complete joint reconstruction, not to mention surgery of that magnitude would likely bench him for months, and what would the Pack do without him?

Just as it is, with the 9mm bullet firmly planted in his triceps, waves of agony spread from the blood pouring hole making every nerve ending pulse. Add to that his dislocated left shoulder and what feels like a few bruised ribs and you can safely say Stiles Stilinski is not having the best night. The pain would be unbearable if it wasn’t for the carefully administered shot of morphine Lydia gave him, but 3 milligrams don’t really go a whole way to numb him, especially when she’s digging in his arm trying to pluck out the bullet with all the grace and delicacy of a butcher.

The tweezers make contact with the smooth edges of the bullet and close around it before Lydia pulls her hand back carefully, holding him still with her other hand, cool fingers curling over his shoulder. The look of resolute concentration in her face is priceless and for a moment he’s back in high school, sitting diagonally behind her and watching, mesmerized, as her brow delicately furrows as she works on her AP calculus problems, thinking she’s the smartest, most beautiful girl in the world. After all this time, with high school and college right behind them, his feelings haven’t changed at all, and he doesn’t think they ever will.

Lydia’s fingers dig a little deeper in his shoulder. The stubborn bullet refuses to be plucked out without a fight and Stiles can feel how Lydia increases her strength, pulling harder, holding on tighter to the slick metal. The effort proves too much. He hisses when the tweezers slip around the bullet, eyes shut and hands fisted in an effort to hold still.

“Sorry.” Lydia reaches up and swipes the perspiring drops of sweat gathered in her forehead with the back of her hand, bloodied and still holding the tweezers. Her other hand never breaks contact with him, rubbing soothing circles with her thumb over his collarbone. “I almost got it, I promise.”

Stiles nods encouragingly and takes a deep breath before she dives in again, which turns out to be a big mistake. His ribs protest the movement and his breath intake is interrupted by a short burst of coughing, which in turn makes his upper body shake jostling his injured shoulder.  Goddamn this night. It’s their freaking anniversary, they should be having dinner at the restaurant he booked one fucking month ago, not performing minor surgery on him on their kitchen.

She waits until he stills again before inserting the tweezers back in the wound. The metal has cooled and the contact with his over-sensitive skin sends chills down his back, but Stiles holds perfectly motionless while Lydia works on him. A few agonizing moments later, Lydia holds the bloodied tweezers before her proudly, the stumped bullet glistening sickly in the lamplight, before dropping it in a platter.

What follows is his favorite part of this whole patching up process. Look, he’s not a masochist or anything, he doesn’t like pain, but he has to admit there is a very distinct difference between just pain, and the pain of the healing process. It still hurts like a motherfucker when Lydia pours a generous amount of alcohol on the open wound and the antibiotic ointment stings him, but there is an element of pleasure in knowing the wound has been treated and that every ounce of pain he feels from now on will be that of his body mending itself, cell by cell.

Yes, he’s weird like that. Don’t judge him, he got shot by a group of hunters bent on decimating his pack not two hours ago, on the night he was proposing to his girlfriend. Give him a break.

And speaking of, he really needs to check on Scott. He reaches for his phone the second Lydia finishes wrapping the bandage tightly around his arm, but she swiftly swats his hand away. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Scott’s probably-“

“He’s fine,” Lydia assures him, an edge of detachment tainting her voice, moving to stand at his back. She places her small hand between his shoulder blades and pushes gently, the coolness of her skin seeping through what’s left of his shirt. He leans a bit forward and braces his good arm against the edge of the table. Lydia’s hand moves from the middle of his back to the side of his injured shoulder and holds steady there while her other hand wraps around the front of his shoulder. “I can hear him. He’s healing just fine and so is Kira.”

Before he has time to brace himself for the pain, Lydia pushes his shoulder up swiftly and efficiently pops the joint back in place. The flash of heat and pain is so sudden his blood rushes to Stiles’ ears, deafening him.

“Fuck!” he growls through gritted teeth.

Stiles sits there for a bit, breathing in and out through his nose until the pain subsides and ebbs away. He hears Lydia moving away from the table, taking the first aid kit with her. He takes off his ruined shirt –he’s learned the hard way through the years that bloodstains are a bitch, and Lydia had to cut it to get to his wound- and walks straight to the trashcan, dropping it inside it.

His hand fishes inside his pocket, feeling the cold silver ring there for a second, reassuring himself that it’s right there, he didn’t lose it, before going to stand behind Lydia at the sink scrubbing her hands clean under the stream of tap water.

He wraps his arms around her waist and nuzzles her neck. She melts against him. “You need to ice your shoulder,” she says, her hands, still wet, coming to rest over his at her front.

“After,” he whispers in her ear, sweeping her hair off her shoulder and peppering a line of soft kisses down the line of her nape.

Her fingers are cold, even though she had both hands under a stream of steaming water, and so is the skin under his lips, but he’s come to expect it in this kind of situations.

There’s still a lot they don’t know about her powers. Even for a banshee, Lydia’s abilities manifest in ways others of her kind never experience. Her hearing is a perfect example. She can hear not only otherworldly voices and those of her sister banshees, but she can pick up on certain frequencies of this world, even from hundreds of miles away, if she concentrates hard enough. This is how she’s able to check in on the rest of the Pack without disturbing them and practically without lifting a finger. The bigger the distance the more strength it takes from her, but with all of them living close by in Beacon Hills it doesn’t really present a problem.

But what really sets her apart from other banshees is her ability to hold back her scream. Even if banshees can foresee death, they have no power over it. They don’t decide if and when someone dies, at most they can advise the person about to die to change their course of action in order to avoid death, but in the end they are just an omen.

Not Lydia. If she doesn’t scream, if she holds it back, no death occurs.

It takes its toll on her of course. It leaves her body deprived of warmth, her throat raw as if the scream had tried to claw its way out, and her heart sunken. She becomes detached and cold and without proper aftercare she could take days to bounce back from one of her spells, if at all.

Stiles turns her around in his arms, gently tilts her chin up with his fingers. Her eyes pierce into his –the vacant look unnerves him. She’s still there, he knows, it just takes a lot for her to come to the surface. She loops her hands behind his neck. “Happy anniversary,” the corners of her lips curl up a little, and it’s all he needs to bend down and lift her onto the counter, damn his hurt shoulder, before kissing her little smile into a breathless moan.

Sometimes, when they’re curled up on the couch relaxing in front of the TV or they go grocery shopping together and argue over which brand of toilet paper they should buy, or when late at night he thinks she’s sleeping and traces their names softly on her lower back with his fingertips, she thinks that’s it. That’s how much she’s going to love him. It couldn’t possibly grow any more. It consumes her, her feelings for him. They are everything inside her and there’s no more room for more. So that’s it, this is how she’s going to feel about him for the rest of her life.

And then those moments end, and new ones start and Lydia knows she was wrong. Because no matter how much she already loves him, always, somehow, he does something and she finds a way to love him more. It keeps her constantly on her toes, sharp. Keeps her feelings for him novel and fresh. She’ll never get to the point when it’s enough. Her love capacity grows exponentially day by day, and it’s his fault and sometimes it scares her.

Especially times like this, when she’s cold all over and her feelings are muted. Her spells leave her detached, unfeeling, like she’s ghost. It’s as if she’s just visiting here and home is on the other side beyond the veil where the voices call to her, where it’s cold and damp and dark. The edges of her vision blur, and her throat throbs with the screams she held back, but nothing hurts as much as resisting the pull toward the other side.

Stiles knows just how to bring her back though, and it’s the fact that he has such power over her that terrifies her and exhilarates her at the same time.

His hot breath against her chilled skin makes her break into goose bumps. He nibbles the shell of her ear, drawing the lobe inside his mouth and gently strokes it with his tongue. Lydia tilts her head back giving room to kiss a path down the line of her neck to the sensitive spot beneath her chin he knows so well. They’re not teenagers anymore, she can’t go to work with a giant hickey on her neck, she would instantly lose the respect of all the lab technicians she worked damn hard to get, because no matter how much makeup she uses to cover it up, Stiles’ mark on her pale skin always stands out proudly for all to see.

So they have a deal. No marking unless it’s the weekend and she has at least two days for the bruise to fade enough to mask it, or unless it’s the middle of winter and turtle necks are acceptable. Today is neither.

But she doesn’t care. She wants him, she needs him and holding anything back feels unnatural. There’s something inside her, pulling her back towards the abyss away from Stiles and she needs him to hold her tight, to anchor her to him. There are two forces at war with Lydia smack in the middle, the darkness calling to her like a siren song and slowly dragging her away, and a tether forged in love and trust and fate keeping her grounded. They pull in different directions and Lydia feels as if she might tear at the seams fighting one and reaching for the other.

She wraps her legs around Stiles’ waist, pushes herself flush against him, digs her fingers in his back. This sense of urgency, her need to lock the cold darkness away is not unfamiliar, she always gets it after she’s overtaken by her powers, and even worse when she represses her wail. But she’s never felt like she might drift away for good. She’s never been this scared.

“Easy,” Stiles whispers, placing a kiss on the corner of her mouth. He brushes her hair off her face, runs his thumb under her eye where wetness has gathered. “Let’s get you cleaned up first. I’m not gonna let you go okay?”

She clings to him tighter when he moves away, shaking her head violently. “No,” she says, face buried in his bare chest, breathing in the mixed scents of sweat, blood, alcohol and _him_ , every muscle in her body taut as she refuses to break contact with him. “Now. It has to be right now. Here.”

Stiles frowns, feeling her neck with the back of his fingers and finding her temperature dropping. Her pulse is steady, but slow, too slow. This isn’t how it usually goes. He doesn’t know why, but for some reason her condition is worsening. The only time he can think it got this bad this soon was back when they didn’t know how to use the tether to bring her back and the situation with Kate Argent got so out of control people were being killed every day. Lydia had fell into one of her fugue states and had disappeared in the middle of the night, leaving him without a word, and spent days in the woods without them being able to find her.

When they did locate her, she was still riding her spell and didn’t even recognize them. But when it was over, when she snapped out of it, she was herself once again and Stiles is not ashamed to admit he cried when he finally got to hold her in his arms.

Only that’s when her temperature started to drop progressively and no matter how many blankets he piled on top of her or how many steaming showers she took, nothing seemed to warm her. And even worst, she started panicking because she felt _something_ wanted to take her away, some invisible force was pulling her ‘to the darkness’ and she couldn’t fight it. Twenty four hours later she’d lost consciousness, was pale as a corpse and he, with the help of her very confused and worried mother, admitted her to Beacon Hills Memorial to treat her, but nothing they did worked either.

She was dying.

He was nearly out of his freaking mind when Deaton came up with a solution. It was a long shot, he’d said, but if her current state was a consequence of her banshee abilities, then they had to fight it with a supernatural weapon. The possibility of Lydia building up mental blocks to ward herself off this invisible force was briefly suggested, but in her debilitated state she wouldn’t be able to do it. The only other way was the tether.

If Stiles learned to use it correctly, fed it, built on it, it could become strong enough to pull Lydia back. Unfortunately time was of the essence and they didn’t have an ‘Emotional tether 101’ manual laying around. And the only ritual Deaton knew to give strength to their bond required submerging Lydia in a pool of ice water and in her condition the risk of losing her for good before the ritual was completed was too high.

So he took her home, set the temperature of the Jacuzzi in the master bedroom to Mordor and scattered a mix of mistletoe, meadowsweet and mandrake Deaton prepared in the steaming water, before submerging his body and Lydia’s in the pool.

He held her close with only her head above the surface, imagining the tether joining them as a red string binding them together pulsing and becoming brighter as he told her he loved her, over and over again, how he needed her and refused to let her go. He told her of the first time he saw her back when they were still kids and how he knew on the spot that she would always be the one for him. He told her about the way her hair caught the sun making her look like a fiery goddess and how her eyes darkened when she was upset. He told her about the summer he spent taking advance math lessons so that he could be in her AP class and about begging Peter to take his life instead of hers.

The water burned him and the fumes of the herbs made him dizzy but he never stopped believing he could bring her back. After a while he didn’t even have to picture the tether, it became tangible to him, winding about them securely and offering protection to the darkness.

It was a living thing, guiding his instincts. It told him to kiss her, to show her the truth in every word he’d uttered to her. And when his lips touched hers she finally stirred and opened her eyes.

She responded to his every kiss and touch becoming more alert with each one. Her pale cheeks turned a healthy rosy color and her body temperature increased until she wasn’t shivering from the cold anymore, but from the pleasure of their skin in contact.

Logically, he’d wanted to stop, give her time to rest and fully recover, but the tether pulsed around them and urged him to go on. After, Lydia would tell him she’d felt it too. It whispered to her, telling her to touch and kiss and take, and the more she did the more the darkness receded.

And so they’d made love in a pool of magical water, mistletoe leaves slushing around them and meadowsweet flowers sticking in the skin.

That was the only time they had to do the whole ritual to bring Lydia back. She built up her mental walls, sturdy ones, and when Lydia felt herself slip away after a banshee spell, Stiles’ presence and his touch was enough to pull her back. The emotional connection they felt when they made love was strong enough to resist the darkness’ pull.

He doesn’t understand why it’s hitting her so hard this time. They’ve faced enemies far more powerful and dangerous than some low level hunters and she’s suppressed screams meant for Scott and Derek and even his father once, but the aftermath has never been this brutal.

Unless…

“It was for me wasn’t it?” he tilts her face up gently but she avoids his eyes all the same. “The scream. It was meant for me.”

Lydia lifts her weary eyelids, heavy with the stress of the last few hours and the devastating knowledge that she could’ve lost him today. Her gut told her from the minute she woke up this morning that something very bad would happen to Stiles and the feeling only grew as the day progressed. She told him and Scott she had a feeling they would be attacked today and so they took every cautionary measure they’ve learned through the years, but she didn’t tell Stiles he was most at risk because she refused to acknowledge it herself. If she had maybe he wouldn’t have been hurt at all.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she sobs, her voice small and pained, looking away, ashamed. It feels like she’s failed him somehow.

“Lydia no,” he gathers her in his arms and carries her bridal style to the living room. She wants to protest, tell him his shoulder and his arm can’t take her weight, to put her down. But the coldness has seeped to every fiber of her being and every word, every movement, calls for a herculean effort from her part. She _can’t_.

Stiles deposits her on the plush sofa and places a kiss on her forehead before peeling off her clothes from her icy skin. She sees the red spot on his bandage growing in size with fresh blood and her body breaks in uncontrollable shivers. That bullet was meant to kill him. It would’ve if he hadn’t moved to the left at the last second possible, lodging in his upper arm instead of piercing a hole in his lung. She’s never experienced more satisfaction that when she plucked the vile projectile out of his flesh where it could do no more harm to him.

His hands burn against her skin. The coldness that has spread through her is strange. It comes from within and no external forces like heat can affect it. She could hold her hand over a flame and her fingers would still be cold and unfeeling. Only Stiles’ touch can bring feeling back to her numbness and under his skilled hands Lydia feels herself beginning to thaw. Her shivers are slowly replaced by pleasure-stricken trembles and when he finally lowers his mouth to cover every inch of her in lengthy kisses and wide swipes of his tongue, she’s strong enough to move beneath him and pull his hair when the teasing becomes too much.

The taste of her is strong and heady in his mouth as Stiles shucks his jeans and his boxers and lowers himself to be cradled between her thighs. He twins their fingers together and brings their linked hands to the armrest over her head, making Lydia arch her back and push her chest up. He holds her hands there with one of his own, takes her mouth, lips and tongues battling in a frenzy and wraps his free arm around her waist, positioning her _just so_ and then finally, _finally_ , sliding inside her.

The coldness is gone. Lydia soars, warm and wet where they’re joined, inviting him further, deeper, _harder_. The pull of darkness receded and she feels the tether vibrating, singing to her, binding them.

They don’t last very long, not in this type of situations. Coming back from the darkness to full-fledged feeling is almost more than Lydia can manage. Her pleasure escalates in a rapid fashion and she knows that because of the way they are linked, Stiles feels what she feels, feeding his own desire.

When they come together it’s intense and sweet and so good it almost hurts. They are drained, both having poured everything onto the other. They are lucky she doesn’t go into her banshee spells too often, and that they usually aren’t quite as bad as the last one, because this aftermath, while sweet and warm and tender, leaves them practically bereft of ties to the world around them, floating in a realm only they exist.

If it were up to her, they would lay like this for hours right there on their living room, naked and wrapped up in each other, but Stiles has other ideas. He carries her up the stairs to their bedroom – _where_ he finds the strength to do so she has no idea- and once they’re both snuggled under the covers, he cuddles her close and begins the infinite drawing of their names on her lower back.

Right before she falls asleep to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, she feels something change within her. It’s faint, new, a flicker. Something in her drowsy state she dismisses in an afterthought. But it _is_ something, light and subtle, and it’s there, almost imperceptible, but _there_. Where it was dark and cold and death called to her.

A spark.

 _Life._

**Author's Note:**

> So? Please tell me you didn't hate it.


End file.
